Powell Valley

Powell Valley is the farm valley at the foot of Cumberland Gap, held between Powell Mountain on the southeast and Cumberland Mountain on the northwest. The best way to see it is from above. The road from the national park’s visitor center climbs four miles to the top of Cumberland Mountain, and from the Powell Valley Overlook, near the Pinnacle Overlook at about 2,440 feet, the valley lies spread out below in rolling hills and farmland.

The valley was a road before it was farms. In 1769 Joseph Martin went into Powell’s Valley for the Loyal Land Company and built Martin’s Station, the westernmost fort of its day, at what is now Rose Hill, Virginia. Indians drove his men out the same year. He came back in 1775, the year Daniel Boone and his axmen cut a trail from the Long Island of the Holston, and the road they made crossed Clinch Mountain at Moccasin Gap and Powell Mountain at Kanes Gap, then ran southwest down the Powell valley to the gap. By the usual count more than 200,000 people went west over it.

On the Tennessee side, Claiborne County was formed in 1801 and Tazewell laid out as its seat the same year. The gap and the county changed hands four times in the Civil War. In 1897 the state chartered Lincoln Memorial University, named for the president who had asked O. O. Howard to do something for the people of these mountains. The Powell River drains the east side of Cumberland Mountain and meets the Clinch inside Norris Lake. It belongs to a river system that holds more than a hundred species of freshwater mussels, a good share of them now listed as endangered or threatened.